AWS drills down into automotive, industrial, financial sectors with new services

AWS re:Invent LAS VEGAS: Amazon Web Services (AWS) zeroed in on a handful of key verticals, moving beyond general cloud capabilities to offer new tailored solutions aimed squarely at the automotive, industrial and financial services sectors.

Fresh offerings include AWS IoT FleetWise and IoT TwinMaker, as well as a new Financial Cloud for Data analytics product the company built with Goldman Sachs.

Mike Tzamaloukas, GM of IoT Automotive at AWS, told Fierce Amazon has been working in the automotive space for years and has already gained a significant amount of traction with its “bread and butter” services among automakers who are moving their on-premises workloads to the cloud. He said FleetWise represents the next step forward as its first purpose-built product for the segment.

At its core, FleetWise is a data collection and transfer tool. Indeed, Tzamaloukas said AWS simply provides the pipe to the cloud and doesn’t act on the information gathered. The value of the product, he noted, lies in its ability to help automakers collect the right amount and the right pieces of data.

Advanced vehicle sensors today can generate as much as 2 terabytes of data per hour. But some of that information is duplicative and not all of it is needed to provide the insights automakers want, Tzamaloukas said. On top of that, data from different model vehicles – even from the same manufacturer – has historically been siloed.

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Enter FleetWise, which allows sensor inputs to be standardized across vehicles. “It’s like a façade,” Tzamaloukas explained. “The standardized format is now doing the mapping between the standard and what is the proprietary encoding. But only the OEM has access to this encoding behind the standardized format.”

With all the vehicle data sets using a common language, automakers can get better insights faster, homing in on different sensors or groups of sensors in a way they couldn’t before. This could be used for everything from vehicle diagnostics to training algorithms for autonomous cars, Tzamaloukas said. Pricing is based on the number of vehicles in the fleet and how much data car companies are using through the service, he added.

FleetWise is now in preview in AWS’ Northern Virginia (U.S.) and Frankfurt (Germany) regions and is set to be released for general availability in the second half of 2022.

TwinMaker and Financial Cloud

AWS is also going after the industrial segment with TwinMaker, a new service which enables companies to spin up digital twins of factories, equipment and production lines.

AWS CEO Adam Selipsky said during a keynote developers can connect TwinMaker to data sources like equipment sensors, video feeds or business applications. The service will then map out the relationships between those sources in real time, allowing users to better understand their physical systems.

It’s also tackling the financial services segment via the launch of Goldman Sachs Financial Cloud for Data. The service is specialized to meet the data management requirements of the sector and designed to make it easier for players in the space to access advanced quantitative analytics. It is available through both AWS Marketplace and the GS Developer Console.

During a press briefing, Selipsky said there is still “insatiable demand” for its foundational services such as storage, compute, database and machine learning. But he noted there’s also “more and more demand for purpose-built solutions.”

“I think really what it’s all about is putting the cloud in the hands of more and more people in the world,” he said. “A lot of these solutions are going to further democratize the cloud. If we can put the power of AWS into a lot more people’s hands, they will be able to innovate.”